Two scientific treatises of Harilaos Koumaras on the field of objective evaluation of the perceived quality of multimedia applications have been accepted for publication by the prestigious scientific periodicals Journal of Communications and Networks (KICS, Technically cosponsored by the IEEE Communications Society) and Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications (Springer Editions). In these treatises, the concept of prediction of the expected digital video quality after encoding is being introduced for the first time; in the same papers, two original methods of its effective evaluation are also proposed.

Audiovisual data recording has already enjoyed great popularity among home entertainment devices (DVD, digital cameras, digital satellite television), as well as third generation mobile phones (3G) featuring recording, playback and transferring of audiovisual data. Therefore, the constant spread of video encoding templates has increased the need for final image quality evaluation methods and techniques in connection with video encoding bit-rate.

The above treatises are a major contribution in this respect, by introducing to the international bibliography the concept of quality prediction instead of just (quality) evaluation. These treatises are the result of a scientific research conducted by Charilaos Koumaras in his capacity as University of Athens’ PhD candidate at the Digital Telecommunications Lab of the Informatics and Telecommunications Institute (National Centre of Scientific Research ‘Demokritos’).

Having been granted a scholarship by the Onassis Foundation, he obtained his MSc Honours on Electronic Automation and Information Systems from the Informatics and Telecommunications Department (University of Athens). With a scholarship from the NCSR “Demokritos”, he is currently working on his PhD thesis on multimedia quality over terrestrial digital television networks. Other activities of Harilaos Koumaras include presentations and publications at international conferences, scientific journals and authorship of technical book chapters.